Winning Against Covid-19: 1 Preventative Lifestyle Measures

CoViD-19, a disease caused by the novel coronavirus, has turned into a pandemic. Last known pandemic was an almost century ago. It has brought down almost the whole world. Over the last five months, we have learnt lot about this enemy. To win against CoViD-19, we must defend ourselves against coronavirus. The good news is that there are multiple levels of defences available to us. So let us understand them first.

1. Preventive Lifestyle Measures

2. Immunity Building

3. Protecting Our Lungs

4. Medical Treatment - Early Symptoms

5. Medical Treatment - Severe Symptoms

6. Medical Treatment - ICU

In this article, let us focus on Preventive Measures that ensure we don’t get infected. Thankfully, these measures are easy to follow, cheap but only requires near complete diligence on our part.

Broadly speaking, the preventive measures are really lifestyle changes that can be divided as follows:

1. Social Distancing,

2. Diet & Exercise

3. Protecting Our Lungs.

4. Mental health.
   

These preventive measures build a series of protective shields, each more powerful than other. However the risk also increases as virus breaks through them.

Social Distancing: By now, we all know that the transmission of coronavirus occurs through cough droplets that contain coronavirus from an infected person. The transmission can happen through air or surfaces. Thus, staying home is the best solution for avoiding coronavirus.

But when you have to be out, CDC suggest 6 ft of social distance to ensure that droplets from another person does north affect you. Of course, wearing masks protects you from these droplets entering your mouth or nose. Wearing face shield provides the protection to mouth, nose and eyes- entry points for the virus in your body.

Also an area of concern has been, how long this virus can stays. Most virologist feel that after sneezing or coughing the virus droplets can stay in the air for no more than a minute or so. And thus does not pose a serious danger.

The coronavirus is known to survive on various surfaces upto few hours at lower temperatures. Thus, washing the most touched surfaces at the home entrance with sanitizer is important. Similarly, washing hands and face every few hours witch alcohol containing sanitizers helps to keep virus away.

So remember, stay @ home, 6ft-social distancing, wearing mask, not touching surfaces and sanitizing your hands and face often are the best way to protect yourself from virus entering your body- is the first shield of protection.

We must strive to defend this first shield of protection, as when virus breaks through it, the risks magnifies. However, the body is designed to fight out these viruses at many levels. This capacity of body is called its immunity.

Diet & Exercise for Immunity Building: Our body builds its immunity using the nourishment it gets. It is therefore important to ensure that our diet helps us the best immunity. There are two ways to achieve it: 1. Exclude the immunity killers and 2. Increase the Immunity Builder foods in your diet.

Like food, simple exercises tone our body into an immunity defense wall.

Defending Lungs:

Once the virus enters the body through mouth and nose, it tries to move to out throat. Throat acts as a gateway to lungs through airways and to stomach. Our body sensing a foreign body, start preparing a defense. Depending on the level of body immunity, it can mount a strong or weak defense that determines if throat is compromised or defended.

Throat is really one of the final destination of this virus, where it creates life threatening damage. Hence protecting lungs is the third shield. We will cover these more into Part 2 and part 3, as part of this 6 part blogs.

Mental Health: A big part of building immunity is just the body but also the mind. So not only we need to build good physical health, but also ensure mental health is in top form. So take time to reach out to people who have least social contact regularly. Big part of mental health is to share your thoughts or allow to share thoughts and create channels to communicate fears, anger and helplessness.

Thus, the best way to win over CoViD-19 is not allow it to enter our bodies, by lifestyle changes. But that may not be realistic for everyone. So do remember, if it does enter our body, there are 5 more shields remaining.